Article An Authentication Study on Grappa Spirit: The Use of Chemometrics to Detect a Food Fraud Silvia Arduini 1, Alessandro Zappi 2,* , Marcello Locatelli 3 , Salvatore Sgrò 1 and Dora Melucci 2 1 Chemical Laboratory of Bologna, Anti-Fraud and Controls Office-Laboratories Section, DT VI, Italian Customs and Monopolies Agency, 40121 Bologna, Italy;
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[email protected] Abstract: An authenticity study on Italian grape marc spirit was carried out by gas chromatography (GC) and chemometrics. A grape marc spirit produced in Italy takes the particular name of “grappa”, a product which has peculiar tradition and production in its country of origin. Therefore, the evaluation of its authenticity plays an important role for its consumption in Italy, as well as for its exportation all around the world. For the present work, 123 samples of grappa and several kinds of spirits were analyzed in their alcohol content by electronic densimetry, and in their volatile fraction by gas-chromatography with a flame-ionization detector. Part of these samples (94) was employed as a training set to compute a chemometric model (by linear discriminant analysis, LDA) and the other part (29 samples) was used as a test set to validate it. Finally, two grappa samples seized from the Citation: Arduini, S.; Zappi, A.; market by the Italian Customs and Monopolies Agency and considered suspicious due to their aroma Locatelli, M.; Sgrò, S.; Melucci, D.